Delaware
Everything to know about Fourth of July weekend at the Delaware beaches
Paddleboarders encounter whale off Bethany Beach
Two of the three paddleboarders were filming.
The theme at the Delaware beaches this weekend is red, white and traffic.
That’s right, it’s the Fourth of July, the busiest week of the year in Lewes, Rehoboth Beach, Dewey Beach, Bethany Beach and Fenwick Island. Multiple towns will host free, not-to-miss firework shows you can watch from the beach, but you’ve got to battle the thousands of other people on the roads to see them. And what if it rains?
Here’s everything you need to know about Fourth of July weekend at the Delaware beaches.
Weather
Wednesday and Thursday are expected to be mostly sunny with temperatures around 80 degrees — great beach weather.
Thursday evening will bring clouds and a 50% chance of storms, according to the National Weather Service, and poor weather is predicted to continue into Friday morning. Friday’s forecast is partly sunny with a 40% chance of rain and highs in the mid 80s.
More clouds are predicted for Friday night, with a chance of storms. Saturday and Sunday are expected to be mostly sunny with a 40% chance of storms and temperatures in the mid 80s again.
Don’t let the threat of a storm ruin your beach day; they often come and go quickly in the summertime. Check the radar often, and look below to see what your town will do if it rains at fireworks time.
Traffic
Look, traffic is going to be bad this week, in the downtowns, on Coastal Highway and everywhere. There’s no avoiding it.
Allow extra time to get where you’re going and even more time to find parking. Bring stuff for the kids to do in the car. For fireworks especially, plan on being in traffic for at least an hour and likely more when leaving town. After the show, linger on the beach or downtown, eat, shop, be entertained — the later you leave, the less traffic there will be.
More: No permits, possible wetlands and a questionable deed on Rehoboth Beach’s Silver Lake
Walking, biking, or taking the DART bus or a trolley are highly recommended. Parking at locations on Coastal Highway and walking downtown is worth it for fireworks in Rehoboth and Bethany — just make sure you wear good shoes.
Above all, be patient and obey the law. Make room for police, fire and ambulance vehicles.
Again for the people in the back: Be patient and obey the law!
Fourth of July celebrations
Lewes
“Go Fourth Lewes” has a full day of events in store for Thursday, July 4. There are free old-fashioned children’s games, such as an egg toss and a sack race, on Second Street starting at 9 a.m. At noon, check out the 28th Annual July 4th Celebration and Car Show at Trinity Faith Christian Center on New Road. It features free food, a bounce house, hayrides, a DJ and more.
The boat parade, which starts at Roosevelt Inlet and heads southeast to downtown, begins at 1:30 p.m.
The Doo-Dah Parade is a uniquely Lewes tradition that has no official start time, but usually begins around 5 p.m. Anyone can participate by meeting in the area of Lloyd’s Market on Savannah Road. The parade winds down Kings Highway to Second Street, then back down Savannah to end at Lloyd’s.
Fireworks begin at dusk, launched from the bay off Lewes Beach.
If the fireworks are rained out, the rain date is the next day, Friday, July 5. More info at gofourthlewes.org.
Rehoboth Beach
Rehoboth Beach will celebrate the holiday Saturday, July 6.
Locals’ favorite The Funsters will play a free concert at the bandstand, which starts at 8 p.m. and continues after the fireworks. Fireworks launch at dusk, or around 9:30 p.m., from the beach near Brooklyn Avenue.
“Because of the extra support personnel we have to bring in, we generally don’t have rain dates,” city spokesperson Lynne Conan said. “We will do our very best to get the fireworks off on the scheduled date, even if we have to decide to go a bit early or hold and go late.”
On Saturday, the city will institute the following traffic and parking rules:
- The Rehoboth Avenue bandstand area will be closed to traffic between 6 p.m. to midnight.
- Henlopen and Surf avenues will be open to bus and resident traffic only beginning at 7 p.m. Residents of Henlopen Avenue, Henlopen Acres and North Shores should use Second Street.
- Beginning at 7 p.m., the circle on Rehoboth Avenue will be open to east and westbound traffic only.
- Beginning at 8 p.m., Rehoboth Avenue eastbound will close at Coastal Highway and all vehicles must enter town via State Road.
- After the fireworks, vehicles north of Rehoboth Avenue will be directed to exit via Rehoboth and Columbia avenues. Vehicles on the south side of Rehoboth Avenue will be directed to Hickman and Munson Streets to take State Road to Coastal Highway northbound or Bayard Avenue to Coastal Highway southbound.
- After the fireworks, DART bus riders can pick up the bus at the Henlopen Hotel.
- No parking will be allowed on Surf Avenue, in the convention center parking lot, in the bandstand area of Rehoboth Avenue, on Grenoble and Surfside places and at certain marked spaces on the ocean block of Hickman Street.
More info at cityofrehoboth.com.
More: Whale breach off Bethany Beach leaves nearby paddleboarders elated to capture it on video
Dewey Beach
Highway One, the company that owns Dewey Beach bars such as the Bottle & Cork, the Rusty Rudder and northbeach, will host fireworks at dusk on Thursday, July 4. They’ll be set off on a barge near McKinley Street on Rehoboth Bay. Contact the Rusty Rudder with questions at 302-227-3888.
Bethany Beach
Bethany Beach’s Thursday, July 4, celebration begins with a parade at noon. It starts at Pennsylvania Avenue and Central Boulevard, traveling south on Pennsylvania Avenue, circling around on Cedarview Street and heading north on Atlantic Avenue to Ocean View Parkway.
There’s a free concert from The 1974 at the bandstand at 7:30, followed by fireworks over the beach at dusk.
The Bethany Beach Trolley will not operate between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Any weather-related changes or cancellations will be posted at townofbethanybeach.com.
Shannon Marvel McNaught reports on southern Delaware and beyond. Reach her at smcnaught@gannett.com or on Twitter @MarvelMcNaught.
Dover, Del. – Health officials, advocates and legislators met in front of Legislative Hall to raise awareness for public health issues being brought up at the state level on Wednesday for the first Delaware Public Health Advocacy Day.
The event, organized by Delaware HIV Consortium, focused on advancing public health policy to increase health equity as speakers advocated for more public health funding and support.
“Public health impacts all of the communities across our state. Public health is the first step of keeping people healthy,” Delaware HIV Consortium Executive Director Tyler Berl said. “And frankly, it’s the cheapest way to keep people healthy and thriving across our state.”
Peggy Geisler, CEO for Sussex County Health Coalition CEO and one of the speakers at the event, stressed the importance of funding for preventative healthcare. Especially, she said, in times of widespread disinformation.
“It’s so important right now is because population health, is under fire nationally,” she said. “I think what’s happening to undermine credible science and actual programming that keeps people like you, me and everyone else safe is a travesty. And I think we in our own state can do something about that.”
Brandywine Counseling and Community Services CEO and President Lynn Morrison was also a speaker and said it was important to make public health a top-of-mind issue with legislators at a time when the federal government has reduced funding after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“If there aren’t additional resources put towards public health, then organizations and programs will surely not be able to continue,” she said.
State officials at the event stressed that health care, while lifesaving, is just one of the many ways to keep communities safe and prosperous.
Secretary of the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, Christen Linke Young, was also a speaker and said that access to healthy food, adequate housing, mental health services and community supports were just as essential to building healthy communities.
“That’s what public health is, and that’s what we’re celebrating today, the community institutions that work day in and day out to serve communities and build a spirit of public health,” Linke Young said.
4-minute read
Mike Purzycki, two-term Wilmington mayor, dies
Mike Purzycki, who remade the Wilmington Riverfront and was elected twice as the city’s mayor, has died.
Mike Purzycki died Tuesday, May 19 at 80. The public record of his life — the Riverfront, the mayoralty, the housing reforms, the man who turned an industrial wasteland into a regional destination — is real and earned. We read it Tuesday morning. We recognize the city Purzycki helped to build.
There is another piece of Purzycki’s life, less public and to us no less important, that the three of us are uniquely positioned to tell. I, Tony Allen, served as the founding chair of the Wilmington HOPE Commission, and Mike served as my co-chair throughout my tenure. With first Provey Powell and then Charles A. Madden as our executive director, and Wolfie Chambers as one of our most important volunteers and advisors — now one of the nation’s leading voices on second chances and gun violence prevention — we built something together that does not appear in the public chronology of Purzycki’s life. The moment of his passing is the right moment to name it.
We come to this tribute from three vantage points: a returning citizen turned national advocate, the executive director who ran the institution day to day, and the co-chair who sat with Purzycki at a round table, grappling with the difficult topics that carried their own advocates and opponents on every side — race, community, crime, brokenness, repair and whole cloth reform — we dealt with it all and then went about the business of trying to do something about it. The relationship the three of us had with Purzycki was an argument we kept choosing to have in the same room. He pushed us. We pushed him. Individually, we all held positions about structural injustice that sometimes made each of us bristle, one to another. Regardless of what side we landed, no one flinched. That is what made the work real, and what makes this tribute possible.
We want to honor Purzycki honestly. He was not a man so certain about Black people that he believed he knew what was best for us. He would have been the first to reject that framing on its facing, noting first that no group of people is a monolith, nor is one group superior in their judgement of another. It was the systems that created the circumstances, a point we all regularly rallied around. Purzycki was our ally — and on some days, our co-conspirator in a fight no one in his world was asking him to take up.
Wolfie Chambers remembers Mike Purzycki
I have been called “the Mayor of Wilmington” in some quarters, and I take no offense to it, but I want to be clear about the chronology. By the time the HOPE Commission and Mike Purzycki entered my life, I had already come home and decided who I was going to become. The Center for Structural Equity I founded at the University of Delaware in 2020. The federal legislation I helped shape. The book I wrote on violence in our city. The presidential pardon I received in January 2025. None of that was given to me. I built it, with the help of many — and Purzycki was one of those many, not the architect of it.
Purzycki never saw the man in front of him as broken. He assumed I was a partner. The first real conversation he and I had, he did not ask me about my time inside. He asked me what I thought the commission was getting wrong. I told him. He disagreed with me on several points, and we went around on it for the better part of an hour. That was the day I knew I could work with him.
We argued over the years about a great deal. About whether young men in our neighborhoods were primarily victims of a system or co-authors of the conditions they lived in — both, of course, but the weighting was a real fight. About how hard to push law enforcement, particularly later when he was mayor and accountability for police conduct sat on his desk. About what counted as success when a man came home. About who got the credit and who got the microphone. Purzycki did not always win those arguments. Neither did I. That is how I know he respected me. It was two men — one Black, one white — who could argue without feeling the need to break each other. As some young people used to say, “Mike was a real one,” even when we simply could not agree.
Charles A. Madden rememebrs Mike Purzycki
I ran the HOPE Commission for many years. For most of that time, I had two co-chairs at the top of the house — Tony Allen and Mike Purzycki — and the way that worked was the engine of everything we built. And while the HOPE Commission brought us together, it was Purzycki the man who has meant so much to my personal and professional development. We spent countless hours together creating countless memories and mutual lessons. What centers my relationship with Purzycki is the fact that he cared about me (the whole person). He fought for me both figuratively and literally AND helped shape the man, the father and professional I am becoming. During a car ride from his home in Maryland, I turned to Purzycki and called him a “painful” man. To be clear, my saying as much was truly a compliment. In fact, his “painful” way is the very reason I hold him in such high regard. The “painful” man expected and demanded excellence from me while modeling as much in our every interaction. I will miss Purzycki painful way of caring and showing up for me in ways few men have.
They did not always see the same problem when they looked at the same room. Allen came from the Urban League, from a public-policy lineage that ran through high profile elected officials, from stout academic grounding in Urban Affairs. PUrzycki came from real estate. He had built the Riverfront. He thought in terms of capital stacks, development timelines,and the leverage of public investment against private return. They had different vocabularies, and a lot of my job was translating between them — and then, when they had argued each other into a synthesis neither would have arrived at alone, helping the staff turn it into a program.
Purzycki pushed me on accountability — on whether we were measuring results, on whether the men we served were being asked enough of themselves, on whether we were too forgiving. I pushed him on context — on what it actually takes to come home to a city that has decided in advance you will fail, on the systems that produce the men we were serving, on the difference between mercy and infantilization. We did not always agree about where the line was. We agreed it had to be drawn together.
He was the rare leader who showed up when there was nothing for him to gain. He was the rare white civic leader who did not flinch when the conversation got harder than his comfort. He was wrong sometimes, and he could be told so to his face. That is a different gift than benevolence.
Mike’s work on reentry was never the work that won him votes. It was never the work that drew the press. It was the work he did anyway. That tells you what he was made of.
Tony Allen remembers Mike Purzycki
I co-chaired the Wilmington HOPE Commission with Mike Purzycki for many years. The hours we logged together at the head of that table are the foundation of what I want to say.
I came to that role from a particular vantage point, a student of W.E.B. Du Bois recognizing both privilege and responsibility in my Black community with Frederick Douglass type sensibilities, in effect that “power concedes nothing without demand.” That double inheritance made me right about nothing. But holding both worldviews in equal measure did teach me the texture of the long argument: that real civic work is not about who is correct in the moment, but about who is still in the room five, 10, 15, 25 years later, not still asking the harder question, but rather the hardest question and never giving up on the work.
Purzycki was such a man.
Our work together with Charles A. Madden, our board and at the prodding of known voices like Wolfie Chambers produced specific things. The expansion of resources into Southbridge — a family crisis therapist at the elementary school, a juvenile probation officer dedicated to the community, outreach workers — of the community — on the ground, and constant advocacy for what many thought of as the forgotten or worse yet, the unworthy. Perhaps most important was a home, the Achievement Center, built with an iconic American black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, that gave our work visible, physical agency, that still shapes the function, face and work of the HOPE Commission today, still anchored in Wilmington but now spread to Dover under the leadership of state Sen. Darius Brown. All of it was instinct meeting investment, under intense pressure, with many competing views. Dare I say, “out of many, ONE!”
But the deeper thing — the thing I have come back to often, and will come back to more now — was something Reverend Lawrence Livingston named in a Delaware Today profile of Black leadership in our state a decade ago. He said that effective leadership in our community is about being “Black enough.” And he defined the term this way: “If you can understand the nature of oppression, whether you are white, Hispanic, or any other ethnicity, then you are Black enough.”
I have thought about that line in relation to Mike many times. He understood the nature of oppression — not as a thing he had experienced, but as a thing he had decided to know. He read it in the data. He heard it in the rooms. He sat with it in the lives of the men our Commission served. He let it change what he believed and how he led. He never claimed our experience as his. He never confused empathy with equivalence. I would not parse these words to ever say my dear friend Purzycki was “Black enough,” but he was enough and there when we all needed him most.
Legendary state Sen. Margaret Rose Henry once observed that the work of civil rights in our generation has shifted from voting rights and equal housing to economic justice, and that our leadership now extends to a broader and more economically driven community. Purzycki lived inside that shift. The Riverfront. The Achievement Center. The mayoralty. They were of a piece — investments in a city whose economic future and whose racial reckoning could no longer be separated.
That is the man I was proud to lead beside. That is the man whose absence I will feel for a long time.
Together, we remember Mike Purzykci
We are not writing a hagiography. Mike Purzycki’s record, like every public servant’s, is a mixed one, and the three of us hold our own critiques of pieces of it. We argued with him in his lifetime. We will continue those conversations now in his memory, because he would have wanted us to.
What we are saying is narrower and more durable than tribute. On the question of what a city owes the men it has sent away — and what those men owe themselves — Purzycki showed up for the long argument, did not flinch from the parts of it that were uncomfortable for him and built, with us, something that did not exist before.
In the by and by, achievements are fleeting, but the legacy of the Honorable Michael S. Purzycki endures.
To Bette, to Gage, to Adriane, to Mick, to his grandchildren — we share your grief. The man you loved at home was the same man with whom we went to battle, together, the same man who built a piece of this city that forever will stand. We loved him, too. We will miss him.
Darryl “Wolfie” Chambers is the founder of the Center for Structural Equity. Charles A. Madden is the former executive director of the Wilmington HOPE Commission. Tony Allen is the president of Delaware State University.
$30K Millsboro police misconduct settlement reveals new details
Millsboro paid a $30,000 settlement, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed.
The rate of “takeover” events in Delaware appears to be going up with the temperature, with recent incidents in all three counties.
“Takeover” events are typically shared via social media, which results in large gatherings of young people that sometimes require a police response.
The evening of May 19, six police agencies in at least 10 vehicles responded to the area of the bandstand in Rehoboth Beach for such an event and now, four Delaware State University students are wanted for inciting a riot.
The Rehoboth “takeover” event was advertised to take place on the beach and boardwalk, according to Rehoboth Beach Police Department spokesman Mark Sweet, but police had “minimal advance notice.”
“As the event grew, additional resources from the area to include the Delaware State Police, the Department of Natural Resources, Dewey Beach Police, Milford Police, Lewes Police and Bethany Beach Police, responded to growing concerns over the safety of people and property,” Sweet said in a statement.
He did not say how many people attended the event or how many were arrested, but said charges included disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, underage consumption and marijuana use in a public space, he said.
Multiple business owners in the beach block of Rehoboth Avenue said there were at least a hundred people at the event and at least one business closed early.
The event was the fifth “takeover” this year, Sweet said, and the people responsible have previously promoted similar events in Rehoboth.
Police are actively looking for the four Delaware State University students, Sweet said, to charge them with conspiracy and intent to commit or facilitate a riot, both felonies. The suspects are ages 19 to 22.
“At this time, there is no known danger to the public and we will continue to monitor future events to ensure the safety of our residents, visitors, business owners, employees, and their property,” Sweet said. “We will take the necessary actions to keep the peace and good order of the City of Rehoboth Beach so that all may enjoy everything the City has to offer.”
The Ice Cream Store is located at 6 Rehoboth Ave. Owner Chip Hearn said his employees had no problems and witnessed no crimes.
“But they’re not out there watching, they’re serving customers,” Hearn said. “I thought police handled it extremely well.”
What’s a junebug?
Large groups of students, typically high school- or, increasingly, college-age, often gather at the Delaware beaches at this time of year. Seniors come to celebrate graduation, and locals call them “junebugs.”
Dewey Beach, especially, has long dealt with the issue.
“Oftentimes underage kids are at a loss for structured activities and they end up loitering outside bars and other restricted venues,” Dewey Beach Police Chief Constance Speake said in a 2024 town newsletter. “Some bring alcohol in back packs and gather on the beach.”
All of Delaware’s ocean beach towns have a curfew. Rehoboth, Dewey and Bethany beaches all have an 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew for those younger than 18. Fenwick Island’s curfew is midnight to 6 a.m.
Rehoboth was the last to institute a curfew, in 2025, and the only one to issue any curfew violations last year. In nine separate incidents, 21 civil citations were issued, 10 of which were for juveniles under the age of 16, according to Sweet.
The context
Large gatherings of students haven’t been confined to the beaches recently, though.
Six teens were arrested at the Christiana Fashion Center May 16 after police responded to reports of 100 juveniles fighting in the parking lot. They were charged with disorderly conduct and other offenses.
In Kent County, public parks closed multiple times in April to prevent such gatherings.
In Smyrna, George C. Wright Jr. Municipal Park closed early April 24 due to a planned, unpermitted party, the Smyrna Police Department said in a Facebook post.
Kent County Parks & Recreation closed three parks earlier in April “due to credible reports of large, unsanctioned gatherings,” a social media post said.
The closures were made out of precaution because past parties have resulted in vandalism and large amounts of trash, Kent Department of Community Services Director Jeremy Sheppard said.
Reach Shannon Marvel McNaught at smcnaught@gannett.com or on Facebook.
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